The Clap Is Back

Richard Lawson's hair is an elegant silver-gold sweep. His bearing is assured, his speech measured and articulate.

He is a gentlemanly--even grandfatherly--man, yet he owns a business where people pay money to have sex with strangers. Club Portland, a bathhouse at the corner of Southwest 12th Avenue and Stark Street, has been open since 1987.

With its gritty yellow brick facade and boarded-over windows, Club Portland lords over Stark Street's gay bars and nightclubs like a four-story citadel. Twenty-four hours a day, gay and bisexual men go to the bathhouse and hook up--no names, or many other formalities, necessary.

Lawson has owned bathhouses in Portland since the late '60s. "The bathhouse is the icon," he says. "It has always been a place where men could meet other men in a discreet, secure environment."

As such, bathhouses have always attracted enemies. When AIDS broke like a tsunami over gay America, both moralists and gay health activists attacked. In San Francisco and elsewhere, baths shut down.

For all his genteel manners, then, Lawson is a survivor. (He's also politically active--he donates to causes like the 2000 campaign against the anti-gay Measure 9, and participates in City Hall discussions about Stark Street's future.) He knows his business is controversial. It's hardly a surprise to him that some are criticizing bathhouses--and the freewheeling, often anonymous sex they cater to--yet again.

This time, the root of the controversy is syphilis.

Syphilis is roaring at epidemic levels among gay and bisexual men across the country. In Multnomah County, reported infections among men doubled between 2000 and 2002, and are on pace to double again in 2003. Oregon is thought to have the nation's sixth-fastest-growing syphilis rate. The trend worries healthcare professionals because syphilis and HIV, in one AIDS counselor's words, "walk hand in hand."

"Syphilis is the bellwether," says Thomas Bruner, executive director of the Cascade AIDS Project, Portland's premier HIV/AIDS advocacy group. "It's the single most important signpost for HIV." That's because, he and others say, syphilis increases indicate a rise in unsafe sex.

And some health professionals and activists say businesses like Club Portland fuel a sex-obsessed gay social scene that's a big part of the problem.

"You can walk into a bar and watch hardcore gay porn while you drink your beer," Bruner says. "Across the street there's a business that charges people to come in and have anonymous sex. I'm not saying there aren't similar businesses that cater to straight people. But do they play the same role they play in gay culture? I would say no."

Bruner believes the rise in syphilis marks a new phase of the struggle against HIV, waged in a newly permissive age. And Lawson says businesses like his make easy targets for unfair criticism whenever STDs rise.

Both men agree that among gay and bisexual men, unsafe sex is back. Twenty years of pro-condom, pro-monogamy messages are kaput. Hedonism has been reborn.

"It's hard to stay scared," says Philip Knowlton, who works for CAP's outreach and education program. "People are raunchier--you see it on TV, you see it when you go out. People want to fuck. They want to eat red meat. They want to drink and have a good time."

Sounds great--except for the genital sores.

If there was a golden age of safe sex, it likely lasted from the mid-'80s to about 1996--the darkest days of AIDS.

A disease--seen, at first, as synonymous with gay sex--came out of nowhere to overwhelm an entire subculture. AIDS has killed more than 250,000 gay and bisexual men in the U.S. The best and brightest--from '50s film hunk Rock Hudson to MTV Real World star Pedro Zamora--got the ink.

And, fitfully enough, America responded. Plays were written--Tony Kushner's AIDS epic Angels in America won the Pulitzer. Tom Hanks landed an Oscar for playing an AIDS victim in Philadelphia. Uncountable rallies, walks, runs, auctions, concerts and galas raised money and consciousness. Red ribbons, symbols of the cause, became a ubiquitous celebrity fashion statement.

The inescapable message of the time: Use condoms or die.

Then something of a miracle happened. In 1996, a new generation of anti-retroviral drug therapies, which reduce HIV in the bloodstream, hit the market. America's annual AIDS death rate dropped dramatically. HIV ceased to be a death sentence. The cultural image of HIV-positive men changed.

"A lot of those guys look great," Knowlton says. "They get their lives together. They eat right and hit the gym. And there's a certain jealousy that's rampant--these guys go out and party, and have as much sex as they want, without a condom, with other HIV positive guys."

The world's focus shifted. When World AIDS Day passed last week, headlines centered on AIDS plagues in the Third World. In America, gay men are now more likely to make the papers for weddings than funerals.

HIV remains incurable, and more than 100 Multnomah County residents have tested positive for the virus each year since 1999. In many eyes, however, the worst is over.

"There are gay and bisexual babies born every day," Bruner says. "There's a generation now who've never been pallbearers at their lovers' funerals. They never watched a friend wither away. And good for them. They're lucky they missed it. But for them, AIDS is a conceptual threat. It's like Vietnam."

Enter the law of unintended consequences.

"Studies show people are tired of using condoms," says Margaret Lentell, who runs Multnomah County's STD office. "There's a sense that HIV won't kill you, that if you do get it you can live with it. And in life, we all make decisions that balance risk and pleasure."

Anecdotal evidence and some studies began hinting at a drop in safe sex in the late '90s. In a recent Oregon survey of gay and bisexual men, only 37 percent said they use condoms consistently. And as if to prove the point, syphilis reawakened, right on cue.

In 1998, the disease that killed Al Capone was nearly history. With syphilis hemmed into pockets of urban blight and rural poverty, the U.S. Surgeon General held a press conference to celebrate its impending demise.

Never underestimate a determined bacterium. Syphilis is a resilient threat, spread by nearly any kind of sex. In its early stages, it causes vile genital, oral or rectal sores--the photos could dull your libido regardless of which team you play for. But those sores go away. Then, after rashes on the hands and feet, the disease enters its latent phase, attacking internal organs, contagious yet invisible.

In the spring and summer of 1999, public-health workers in San Francisco ran across a small knot of cases linked to an America Online chat room called San Francisco Men 4 Men. This proved to be the advance guard of syphilis's revival.

In 2002, San Francisco reported 315 syphilis cases. In Seattle, which recorded exactly zero syphilis cases in 1997, officials now expect scores of infections each year--50 or 60 among gay and bisexual men are predicted for 2003. Nationally, syphilis is up 9 percent, with gay and bisexual men making up nearly half of all new cases.

Portland's numbers are smaller than those in bigger cities but have spiked on an exponential curve. Multnomah County recorded just one syphilis case among gay and bi men in 1996. Last year, there were 18. This year, the county is on pace to record about 35.

The totals look tiny. But they worry epidemiologists.

"San Francisco and New York went from double digits, like Portland now, to triple digits in just a couple of years," says John Douglas, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doctor.

The outbreak is concentrated among white gay and bisexual men in early middle age, living in dense urban areas. (New York City health officials even break it down to income: $30,000 a year and up.) The epidemic is landing hard on a sliver of the overall population.

Syphilis is serious, though easily stopped by an early antibiotic dose. Left untreated, it causes madness, blindness and death. But the link to HIV is what really worries people. Because syphilis sores are "portals of entry" for HIV, the pox makes it easier to both contract and spread the virus. And people with syphilis have typically had unsafe sex with not just one but many partners.

Public-health officials look at this, and see potential disaster. It doesn't help that this particular outbreak seems custom-designed to thwart their efforts to stop it.

Club Portland isn't the city's only bathhouse. It has cross-town competition from Steam Portland, opened on Northeast Sandy Boulevard last February by businessman David Anderson. Steam, which markets a sleek and upscale scene, claims it's sold 5,000 memberships in 10 months. And then there's porn-shop king Tracy Blakeslee's XES, a sex club on Southwest 13th Avenue.

Club Portland, however, proclaims itself the largest bathhouse on the West Coast. Its size and location ("In the Center of it All") make it the most visible exponent of an industry that appears to be booming in Portland.

To get into Club Portland, you must pass muster with an employee behind a window in a small entry lobby. If you don't look too drunk or drugged, the employee buzzes you in through a stark metal door. You must have a club membership--$15 for six months, $25 for a year--and to buy a membership card, you must have valid ID.

Then you find yourself in the inner lobby, where bubblegum pop plays over the stereo. You pay more money--$12 for a locker on weekend nights. Weekend room prices start at $15 for a "spa room," a small chamber containing a narrow cot, with partition walls that don't reach the ceiling. Fancier rooms, which include TVs with four channels of porn, run $20. Those rates are good for eight hours, but the bathhouse also offers a few full-scale hotel rooms for up to $55. Hotel-room guests can come and go as they please.

In the inner lobby, you get keys and a towel. You can buy combs, razors, $5 cock rings and tubes of lube.

Then, it's your choice. Downstairs, there's the "bootcamp," featuring Desert Storm-esque decor, a real 1940s Army Jeep (code-named "Booty") and a row of phonebooth-sized cubicles linked by strategically placed holes. Or you can climb winding stairs to three floors of labyrinthine, blacklit hallways lined with small rooms. Porn runs in a small viewing room with bleacher-style seating. The smoking lounge, on the other hand, features local TV and copies of Details. Individual showers, "gang showers," a blinding steam room and a sauna comprise the clean, well-lit "wet area" on the second floor--a comparatively small piece of the total space, but the bathhouse's epicenter.

At noon on a rainy December day, the place is nearly deserted. A few shirtless men wrapped in towels wander the halls. (It's a more crowded scene on weekend nights.) Lawson greets patrons with a cheery "How are you today?," like any small-business owner. The vibe is an odd mix of the seedy and sterile, lubricious and mundane. Plastic bins heaped with condoms are everywhere.

To the uninitiated, the relentless focus on sex can be disconcerting. But straight guys who think bathhouses sound weird or gross might ask themselves how they would view a comparable institution catering to their desires.

Lawson doesn't deny that unsafe sex happens in Club Portland. Yet he believes sex businesses take unfair heat every time an STD makes the rounds.

"It can be very difficult for a sexually hyperactive gay man to put a finger on when he may have contracted an STD," he says. "So what's the easiest thing for him to say? He got it in the bathhouse."

When AIDS erupted in San Francisco in the early '80s, the city shut down bathhouses amid much acrimony. Since then, a countervailing theory has taken hold in most public-health circles. Closing bathhouses, this school of thought holds, only makes unsafe sex invisible.

"It's a question of which comes first, the chicken or the egg," says Bruner, whose organization declines to take a side in the debate. "Do these places fill a demand, or does their existence create demand? The scene is also pretty big in a place like Portland--it's not just bathhouses. Plenty of unsafe stuff is going on in other venues."

Bruner does think Portland sex businesses could do more: establish zero-tolerance policies for unprotected sex and drug use; kick violators out permanently; provide more access to educational materials, testing and counseling. "They have a moral obligation to do these things," he says.

"At a certain point, it's an issue of personal responsibility," Lawson counters, noting that Club Portland stocks literature on STDs and polices for drug use. "If someone has a proclivity for unsafe sex, that behavior will follow him to the bathhouse, or wherever else he goes."

The unenviable task of stopping Portland's syphilis surge falls, in large part, to a handful of Multnomah County STD investigators. For decades, such sleuths have pursued syphilis through the nation's lowest juke joints, brothels, honky-tonks and jails.

Multnomah County employs six "disease intervention specialists," among them Lisa, a plain-spoken brown-haired woman, and Ramon, a burly Army vet. You could call Lisa and Ramon STD detectives, except they hate that term. "It makes us sound like the sex police," says Lisa, "which we're not."

By law, doctors must report syphilis cases to health authorities. Once a case comes to light, Lisa and Ramon go to work. They interview the infected, trying to elicit names and descriptions of sex partners. The problem with this outbreak is that those names are hard to come by.

"Guys we're seeing are saying 10, 15, 20 anonymous partners, sometimes all in the same night," says CAP's Philip Knowlton, whose organization also counsels STD patients.

But then, anonymous sex has been around forever. What makes this outbreak so particularly murky? Lisa and Ramon--along with public-health officers around the country--say the key difference is digital.

If safe sex started to decline in 1996, the Internet exploded at about the same time. The Nielsen company says the number of wired Americans has increased seven-fold since then. Not all of them are just browsing eBay.

On slick, professional gay.com, users can dig through a trove of more than 2.7 million online personals. They can email or chat with people who they know only by screen name. Click over to bareback.com, and things get more frank--the site exists strictly to help men who want condomless sex find each other. "Our guys fuck and suck without any barriers, lectures or bullshit," the site proclaims.

"You can go on Portland Craig's List, and have sex with someone you've never seen before within hours," says Ramon, referring to the local version of the national listings site. "And that goes for straight and gay people." The county's response is hampered by its computer system's filter, which doesn't allow investigators to view explicit sites.

And there's yet another X factor shuffled into the mix: drugs. Some personal ads on gay-oriented sites announce an interest in "party 'n' play," an innocuous phrase that's become code for crystal-meth use.

The drug is a statewide scourge, as evidenced by Gov. Ted Kulongoski's recently launched meth taskforce. But in Portland as across the country, meth is thought to be raging in the gay community. Scientists think meth elevates the brain's dopamine levels for long periods, and dopamine is thought to trigger sensual desire.

Thomas Bruner agrees that drugs and the Internet play key roles in the syphilis outbreak. But he also says the thriving existence of Club Portland, Steam and other sex businesses is symptomatic of deep-seated glitches in gay culture.

Bruner, an ebullient and expressive (and gay) man, moved to Portland from Austin in 1998 to take over CAP's top job. He believes the demand for sex clubs and bathhouses, in part, stems from the alcoholism, anxiety disorder, depression and self-esteem issues endemic to gay men. It also has to do, he says, with his own subculture's tolerance of behavior that makes people sick.

"Groups that are oppressed, sometimes you see that, sure enough, their behavior reflects their oppression," he says. "But how much is expectation? Of young gay men being taught that, well, this is what you do? It's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy people buy into."

When they talk about stopping syphilis, people talk about education. Cascade AIDS recently started DigiGUYS, a new outreach effort targeting popular gay websites. Portland's sex clubs and bathhouses carry literature on syphilis and other diseases. County health workers say advertising campaigns focused on syphilis seem to have improved the information they're getting from patients.

But still, the numbers are rising, prompting a fundamental question: Who could possibly know more already about the merits of safe sex than gay white urban males in their 30s and 40s?

"After two decades, millions of dollars and thousands of deaths, have we failed?" Bruner says. "Do these diseases just come and go, and you can't do much about it?

"Everyone is always looking for catalytic events and factors that explain why people do what they do. But maybe there's a part of hedonism and recklessness that just doesn't make any sense."

Meanwhile, Club Portland and its competitors (plus, of course, the Internet) remain open around the clock--serving a demand in many ways as old as time, in many ways rooted in the deepest needs of the heart.

The "clap"--from the Old French clapoir, or brothel, by the way--often refers to gonorrhea. It can also refer to syphilis or other STDs.

Overall, gonorrhea rates have fallen slightly since 2000, both nationally and in Oregon. Rates among men who have sex with men, however, are up. According to the state health department, gay and bisexual men made up more than half of males with gonorrhea who were interviewed by health workers in 2002.

For more information on Club Portland, including photo tours of the bathhouse's five levels, see www.clubpdx.com .

Club Portland reserves a room in which Cascade AIDS Project and Multnomah County Health conduct STD testing, outreach and counseling. In addition, owner Richard Lawson is listed as part of CAP's "Gold Council," donors who give the nonprofit between $2,500 and $5,000 a year.

While other cities have declared official syphilis epidemics, Multnomah County's outbreak is currently an "emerging epidemic."

Find recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stats and statements on the syphilis outbreak at www.cdc.gov/od/oc/media .

Health officials nationwide say they fear unsafe sex is also on the rise among heterosexuals.

Multnomah County Health Department's STD program can be contacted at (503) 988-3700 or at its offices at 426 SW Stark St., sixth floor. Cascade AIDS Project runs a hotline at (503) 223-AIDS or 1-800-777-AIDS.

The film version of Tony Kushner's Angels in America debuted this week on HBO.

Syphilis photos can be viewed at www.stdtest.org , a site that's part of San Francisco public health's effort to stem the outbreak. Consider yourself duly warned.

The popularity of crystal meth among some gay Portlanders was recently covered in depth by Just Out newspaper.

Steam Portland is located at 2885 NE Sandy Blvd. The new bathhouse's membership rates and room fees are similar to Club Portland's. The club's website, complete with photo tour, can be found at www.steamportland.com .

Steam owner David Anderson says the club maintains a ban on barebacking, or unprotected anal sex. He says that, for the most part, the ban is enforced by an honor system.

WW's Mari Brookshire and Byron Beck assisted in the research and reporting of this article.

WWeek 2015